Monday, March 19, 2012

Online Communities

Dear Nacy Baym,

In your book, in Chapter 4, you talk about communities and networks. Specifically you mention that online groups cannot be communities the geographical dispersion of people in different areas. I highly disagree because for a group of people to be a community they do not need to be together. Saying they are not a community because they are not together is like saying a family is not a family unless they are together all the time. A community is simply a group of people that interact with one another with a common interest whether it be a place, topic, or hobby. Even if the area in which they met mattered in whether they could be a community or not, an online group would still fit because cyber space would be there area in which they meet or even space within cyber space would also fit. Even meeting on different sites or different online platforms fit because they site or space is providing the area for people to meet and that case online groups are communities.

One of the things that I think online communities are better than physical communities is the simple fact that we have so ways to communicate online with each other rather than what we have in physical communities. But at the same time people could say that in the physical we have more ways when you take into account the fact that physical communities have the non verbal communication to communicate. But even online we have taken those same non verbal communication cues to use online when we understand what people have to say.